Katy Smith - Free Men

That evening I rode to a local public house and drank enough ale to drown a pig and decided that if ever I wanted to be a scientist in the manner of the cartographers I idolized in my youth, if I wanted to advance my own embryonic theories, then I must renounce the self that over the years had become a prison.

We had no child yet, so when I told my wife that I no longer wished to live in France, in any place where man was so impossible to measure, I had little guilt about what I abandoned. I adored her, genuinely, but this was not enough and even this she would not believe. I was bored, I was impatient, I was a shockingly young man who was hungry for any country but his own. I would have followed a river to the sea provided it was untamed.

I AM GAZING off to the east, looking idly for signs of the old burial mounds that rise like cresting whales from the earth and contemplating what manner of precious icons might be found if the graves were uncovered, when the Indian behind me, who has sworn the Creeks are no relation to the mound builders, stops his humming.

A man comes toward us down the trail, dragging behind him a rickety two-wheeled cart that kicks up puffs of red dust. My best guess is that he is a Spaniard, or perhaps English with a small dose of African. His large dark eyes move over us as though we were nothing more than trees, but when my companion calls out to him, he pulls his cart up short.

“Care for the news?” he asks.

“I’ll take the news if it concerns the men I’m looking for.” My horse is nervous beneath me. I have learned he is quite sensitive to smell, and has a strong preference for well-groomed men.

“Where were they born?”

“That I cannot tell you.”

He pulls a folded paper from beneath a rock in his cart, and now I can see that his load is composed entirely of newspapers. He carries no other bag with him, so I cannot think where he keeps his personal effects.

As he opens the paper, it becomes evident that the darkness of his hands is due not to parentage but to smudging. “Well, do you know the times? Were they born in the early morning, or around dusk?”

“My good sir, I have merely their descriptions.” I turn around to the slave and nod.

He brings his mule up to the front and says without intonation, “One man Creek, some tattooed; one man white and thin; one man negro like me, but lighter. All dirty. Carrying heavy sacks.”

The newspaper man pivots his head back and forth. He is still engaged with the printed word, which at this distance is not distinguishable as one of the common papers of the day.

“Have you seen them or not?” I ask.

He looks up. “This is news from the stars,” he says. “Not of men. You’d do well to find out what it says.”

“Astrology?”

“I can see the twins here, but they’re not ready yet, and they’re only two men, not three. No, all that’s above you is the crab, and hear me, he’s ornery. He was sent to topple Heracles, but Heracles was many-muscled, much too strong, and stomped him once then kicked him to the heavens.” He turns his head up to the late morning sky, which is silken blue, empty of both clouds and stars. “Shh, he can hear us now.”

“I will be cautious,” I say. “But the three men we mentioned?”

“Yes, I did see three, not two, and with heavy sacks. But the news is sixpence.”

I shuffle in my pockets for the change and toss it to him.

“I saw them this time yesterday, headed south, as you’re headed south, on foot and very dirty.” He runs a hand through his hair as if to prove his own superior hygiene, but a moth flies out from one of his curls. “One was born in Carolina. You’ll catch up to them soon if they don’t head west.”

“And why would they head west?”

“Because that is where the heavens go.” He picks up his cart and trundles past us, heedless of the stamping horses.

WHO IS SETTING their course? Are they aiming north toward freedom, east toward home, or merely circling around the Indian towns, hoping for asylum? I am keen now to every scuffle in the dust, each branch leaning over the trail that might have caught at a shirtsleeve. We eat while riding and we ride at a modest clip, not only because of the slave’s tetchy mule but also because speed inhibits perception. This has been a late lesson of my life, and if I could wind myself back and advance at half the speed, I believe I would derive significantly more pleasure from daily affairs.

The afternoon’s conversation centers on the afterlife, and whether the second Creek man will see the first Creek man once they are dead and under.

“If you’re satisfied, you’ll stay put in your grave and then I don’t think you’d see anyone at all. Otherwise, you’d ghost about, scaring children, but not sitting around with any other ghosts. So either way, no, I don’t think we’ll meet each other.”

“But ancestors talk to each other to sort the lives of the living.”

“We’re not ancestors yet.”

“We could be, down the road, unless you marry the Iroquois and then none of your sons and daughters will be Muskogee and we’ll be ancestoring in different countries altogether.”

“I thought he was too ugly to marry an Iroquois,” says the third.

“What if we were buried under the same house?”

“There’d still be dirt between us and our eyes would be closed.”

“But we’d know we were side by side.”

“Maybe, but no one’s going to put us in the same house, and if we can’t talk to each other, what’s the point?”

“Are you saying you want to talk to me forever?”

“No! You’re the one wanted us side by side.”

“That was an example. If anyone’s dead next to me, it’ll be a woman so beautiful she’ll be better than life itself.”

“Did you kill her?” asks the third.

“You two are pointless. The Iroquois have twice as much sense.”

It may be surprising to European readers that the native peoples here, often considered superstitious and spiritually primitive, equal our modern philosophers when it comes to uncertainty about the hereafter. I need to make a note that one aspect of the connective human thread may be faith, or rather the lack thereof.

The light is falling when I see it: a broken trail into the western brush, covered immaculately by an Indian hand and thus perfectly legible to me, his artfully scattered leaves as artificial as footprints. I pull the men up short. I can see fifty yards into the forest before the creeping darkness covers the rest.

“Is this the way we go?” asks the third man.

The slave is several paces behind us, his mule gnawing at a hoof. The poor negro is hunched over in a position of complete reluctance.

I have not been given a particularly promising retinue; the slave’s actions suggest he would as soon cower in a cave as confront the bandits, while the Creek men are as noisy a bunch of chatterers as I have seen in the Indian territories. I have tracked villains before, and being black-hearted and craven, they are easily startled. It will be easier if I advance alone. Not only can I come upon them more quietly, but I can take in their character; before I capture or kill them, as the moment requires, I need to learn what drew them together. If this is to be a central case in my proposal to the Royal Society, I must have adequate firsthand evidence. If I were not nearly middle-aged, I would think myself nervous. What will they be like? There must be a strain of cruelty in every breed of man, along with the good in him.

“I shall proceed from here alone,” I say.

The slave gives a brief smile.

“Aren’t there three men?” the third man asks, looking at the other Creeks, sizing up a three-man force. “How’ll you catch them all?”